Will the US Postal Service survive for another 20 years? Should it? Mail fascinates me. I have no idea why. (Then again, I have no idea why I am fascinated by 90% of the things which fascinate me.) It’s not that I like sending physical letters; I don’t. I have converted every bill I can to electronic payment. And it’s not that I get a lot of mail I like to receive. My Wall Street Journal is delivered by the USPS, but that is just an … [Read more...] about Wait a Minute, Mr Postman
Modern Society
On Technological Stagnation
“No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.” Constitution of the United States, Thirtieth Amendment. Thus begins Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, included in the Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels: 1953-1956. The first thing to note about this novel is that it does cause one to … [Read more...] about On Technological Stagnation
The New Class Conflict
Every now and then a book comes along which while not really saying anything you didn’t know already, rearranges all those bits of knowledge into a new, and fairly interesting, pattern. Joel Kotkin, The New Class Conflict is such a book. Here are the bits of information: 1. There is a growing divide in American society (See Charles Murray’s Coming Apart for the best description of this divide.) The divide is not solely income based. The divide is also a cultural … [Read more...] about The New Class Conflict
Corporations, Marxists, and the Academy
Why Teach? An interesting question, that. Mark Edmundson asks that: Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education. In a curious way, this was a rather thought-provoking book. It’s a collection of essays which, truth be told, meander all over the place, united only by the fact that they have something to do with education. The book is best described as a cri de coeur. Edmundson looks out and sees a sterile corporatized (a favorite … [Read more...] about Corporations, Marxists, and the Academy